The importance of ethical SEO

Ethical SEO is something that big search engines such as Google are trying to promote and value highly such online strategies in their search engines. This is because search engines such as Google want a natural set of results in their search indexes. They are against websites manipulating the search results and thus not giving users the natural and possibly most quality set of results when searching. Google has an algorithm to try and identify unethical SEO techniques used by websites.

Some of our recommendations on ethical SEO are:

Natural link building – do not pay for link building/buy links. This is seen as manipulating the search results and thus can be classed as unethical. Google run a regular update called the ‘penguin update’ which tries to identify and potentially impose a penalty on websites who have unnatural back-links going to their website. Only aim to build/attract natural links, this can be done through creating quality and unique content on your website which other people like. Effort into writing great content is very much recommended.

Natural on-site optimisation – do not stuff the META data in your websites with purely keywords, make the title tag and META description flow naturally and be relevant to the page itself. We also recommend that the content on every page on your website is unique. Spun or duplicated content is not valued highly by Google and can penalise the website. Google have an update which is run often called the ‘panda update’ which checks websites for duplicated and poor quality content and penalises ones that have it.

An appropriate ethical SEO strategy is logically going to be valued more highly by the big search engines such as Google. Especially a natural back-link profile and quality unique content throughout the website is likely to result in far less risk of being penalised by the panda and penguin update from Google. We also believe unique content which is well researched and written can result in a better conversion rate – unique product descriptions can help people know more about products a business is selling on a website.

Author Gyles Seward

Small correction: Google’s Penguin and Panda updates aren’t updates in the sense that they are run on a regular schedule (as your post seems to suggest), instead they’re both permanent tweaks to Google’s search algorithm that decides how web sites/pages should be ranked in search results.

elementarydigital

very true RightSaidJames, indeed Panda has now been integrated in the Google algorithm, by ‘regular’ we were referring more to the frequency of changes that have taken place and then impacted websites. Thank you for reading the blog and your feedback, please have a look over our other articles. If you’d like to contribute please let us know. All the best ED.